Monday, March 04, 2002

Jenny the librarian: "I've come to believe that news aggregation based on RSS feeds of web sites (newspapers, blogs, magazines, etc.) is the future and that the Net Gens will grow up with this as their primary news source." [RSS AGGREGATORS]

John Robb "Next Generation P2P Systems - The biggest problem with Kazaa, Morpheus, etc is the inability to create subnets where an individual can create publish great content that is only shared with people they trust.  There isn't any trust on these systems.  There isn't any room for homesteaders of original content or high quality organization.  Just a bunch of anonymous users sharing content of low quality they don't have a right to redistribute.  To get to the next level in P2P there needs to be three things: 1) The ability for individual users to create subnets where authorization is required before use is enabled. 2) The ability to publish structured content such as a complete web site or web app to a  multi-million person network without flooding the publisher's PC.    3) The ability to connect subscribed users in a given subnet to each other via Web Services in order to enable a new class of applications that share information (but don't utilize centralized resources). To top it all off, this system needs a complete development environment that enables users to build new Web apps for the system.  A platform.  Notice, that in this system, the P2P transport is important but generic -- it is just a pipe.  Granted, there is some heavy lifting yet to done in the P2P space to address scaling and indexing issues, but in this system it doesn't have to be completely decentralized to avoid legal action.  It also doesn't need to use IE.  Read Reed's law to get a feel for how this works. This is going to come.  Who has the vision and the $$ to pull it off????  Note that in this system, copyright infringement is an attribute and not the sole purpose of the network.  This has been a dream of mine since I wrote a report on this topic at Forrester in 1996.  It is going to happen, but when?" [P2P]

John Robb "Subscription Sharing Systems (RSS) - This was published to the K-Logs group (knowledge management weblogs) on Yahoo.  You are welcome to join (349 members and growing).   Note to new arrivals, subscriptions are called RSS newsfeeds in the weblog world (an xml-based format for easy syndication of Web content).  Simply put, RSS news is a short summary of new posts to a website that changes often (a general news source or weblog).  RSS information for a site is published as an additional page to the published website.  For example:  here is my weblog's RSS newsfeed:   http://jrobb.userland.com/rss.xml   A desktop subscription news aggregator, like Radio and other tools, automatically visits the RSS pages of all the sites you are subscribed to every hour looking for a new entry.  When it finds a new entry it includes it on a news page on the desktop with entries from other sites.  Here is what my newspage looks like (it is automatically created when I publish to my site) on my desktop:   http://jrobb.userland.com/images/newspage.jpg   In many ways an RSS subscription is like an active bookmarking system.  Unlike a bookmark, you don't have to visit the sites you subscribe to in order to get new information.  It saves time.  If you are trying to keep tabs on dozens of sites, this is a must.    Sharing subscriptions to news sources and great weblogs is like sharing a bookmark list.  Jon Udell (a technology journalist and analyst) put his current subscriptions on his weblog here (on the right hand margin):   http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/03/03.html#a99   Aggregating subscriptions is a new area.  You can get a large list of RSS subscriptions at newsisfree.com (put together by Mike Krus) and syndic8.com (put together by Jeff Barr and help).  Both are excellent sites with thousands of news sources.  You can also actively aggregate the use of subscriptions in new ways.  Here is an example of an "RSS stock exchange" that ranks the RSS subscriptions people in the Radio community are using.  Note:  This is going to be a feature set on the new UserLand Radio Community Server (RCS) that will enable you to set up a sharing network in your corporate environment (in addition to rankings of page views of participating weblogs, referrer lists, and much more).   http://subhonker7.userland.com/rcsPublic/ranking?group=rss   Notice the mix of external news sources and personal weblogs.  Nice.  This is the start of the next generation of the Web's linking system.  It's active, smart, and easier to use than the current bookmark based system." [RSS]